Stripy

MONKEY

I’m writing this half way to Norwich from my new home in London (hopefully more on this later). My new job hardly gives me any time to check normal PhD e-mails, but this week I had some most lovely correspondence from the International Primatological Society telling me my abstract has been accepted for a poster presentation at IPS 2016 in Chicago. Huzzah!

To celebrate I thought I’d do some field reminiscing about Ecuador, which in this wintery weather really does feel thousands of miles away. Getting a decent picture of a monkey at my field site is practically impossible without a lens that is both too heavy to carry round and too expensive to contemplate without crying, as the unhabituated little rascals like to keep their distance. The nearby town of Coca however has a tiny group of common squirrel monkeys that can be reliably seen from the riverfront, and this is where I took these photos. Visiting them results in a mixture of emotions – it’s such a treat to see them up close, and I love how the photos show their little hands and feet, so similar to ours. I’m pretty sure they rely on human hand outs though, and while this time it was fruit it’s distressing to see them eating processed stuff. Thankfully, they still retain a lot of their wariness, and hopefully, their independence.